Benchmarking services help centre

The Delivery module provides insight into the relative size of your ICT service, and how you develop your staff. It helps to identify if you are investing in the correct end-user devices; if you have the correct level of staffing and whether you are adopting the best policies to assist those staff. To take part in the service, each participating organisation must provide a count of staff, devices and end-users and state your approach to staff training and wellbeing.

The Cost module examines the cost efficiency of your ICT service. By comparing your organisation with others, you can identify areas for cost reduction and those that require additional investment. As well as measuring the overall cost, it monitors device, support and network costs. You need to provide details, such as number of users, devices and staff, and additional data.

The Performance module looks at the relative performance of your ICT service. It shows how your project performance, key systems availability and incident resolution rate compare to similar organisations. As with all modules, you’ll be asked a series of questions to ensure greater precision.

Our user satisfaction surveys collect data from potentially thousands of your users and the Power BI report contains several features not found in our other modules.

These surveys allow organisations to understand how their users feel about the ICT they receive. In addition to the overall satisfaction of the service, users are also asked to rate 35 aspects of the service, including:

• Communication channels and customer service skills
• The technical competency of support staff, including diagnosis and ability to fix
• Reliability of systems
• Support given to deliver services and work flexibly
• Fitness for purpose of hardware and software systems

The analysis allows participating organisations to see where they should target improvement. To support analysis, results can be viewed in the context of other organisations or internally by role, location, department, mode of working or device type.

To participate in this service, you only need to provide a list of email addresses for each user, along with their segmentation choices (i.e. which roles, departments and locations you wish to use for analysis).

The User Skills module allows you to determine which ICT tasks you users are confident in undertaking.  This will help you to decide what can be expected of them with regard to self-service operations, while also identifying areas where additional training would be beneficial.

To participate in this service, you only need to provide an email address for each user, along with segmentation choices (i.e. which roles, departments and locations you wish to use for analysis).

Benchmarking compares a group of organisations by asking each a set of identical questions.  The collective responses identify how a typical organisation would respond.  Each participant can then assess their relative performance by comparing how close they are to this “typical” response.  

Your report will compare you against all other participants from the last three years.  However, you will also be given access to data collected over the last decade from over 180 public sector organisations.  This will allow you to tailor your benchmark to organisations that you view as similar to yourself. 

We benchmark a wide range of organisations, so have developed questions and measures that take into account variations in size. 

But if you have further concerns, please contact us for further details. 

No, in our reports your data will be anonymised and only be identified by a reference number that conveys your organisational type and the year you participated. 
 
Your identity will only be revealed to other organisations if you choose to attend one of our workshop events, and then only with your express consent. 

We currently focus our benchmarking on the ICT service of organisations in the following areas: 

• Delivery – How you are delivering your ICT service.
• Cost – How much your ICT service costs to deliver.
• Performance – How well you are delivering your ICT service; as determined by objective measures.
• User Satisfaction – How well you are delivering your service in the eyes of your users.
• User Skills – How competent in ICT are your end users, and how could they benefit from training.

Our modules have been developed in consultation with public sector organisations to ensure that they can be answered by most participants while providing valuable and valid data. 

We regularly review our modules to ensure they remain relevant and look for additional points of comparison. 

What constitutes “Good” can vary depending on the historical aims and challenges of your organisation.  For example, having relatively few service desk calls could be the result of a very robust service, but it could also imply that users are avoiding the service desk for all but the most extreme cases.

For this reason, we generally prefer to focus on the responses made by the majority of organisations rather than outliers with particularly high or low results. 

Participants are also encouraged to view their results in the context of other known factors within their organisation, and form conclusions on a range on comparisons rather than a single result. 

To discuss your options or purchase any of the modules, please get in touch through our contact us page and choose ‘Benchmarking’ as your area of interest. We will be in touch soon after to help you through the process.

Upon purchasing the service, you will be emailed a login to our online survey portal.  This will allow you to enter your responses at your own pace, and choose when to submit them.

After completion, we will validate your data and provide you with a link to the results via online Power BI report.

User Satisfaction and User Skills are both assessed by asking your entire user base to complete short surveys. 

Other modules are completed by a member of your staff.  During both processes you will have access to one of our Delivery Consultants to guide you and resolve any queries. 

User Satisfaction and User Skills surveys are conducted over a three to four week period. This ensures a relevant number of responses, while still keeping the results to a set period. 

Completing the other modules usually involves approx. two days of effort spread over four weeks. This allows time to determine who is best to answer each of the questions and to collate the response. 

You can use our benchmarking services at any time throughout the year. But to maintain the integrity of comparisons we ask that modules that do not survey end-users always cover whole financial years (i.e. April to March).

Upon submission of your data, you will be provided with access to your results in a Power BI report.  These have been designed to be self-explanatory, but one of our consultants will be happy to guide you through the main features.  

Additionally, you will be invited to one of our regular workshops where the results from the past year are discussed by participants to provide context and colour to the data.

If you wish further analysis of your results, including the development of any bespoke reports we can also accommodate this for a further charge. 

To provide a consistent benchmark for our participants, we attempt to keep changes to modules to a minimum. However, with our User Satisfaction and User Skills modules we can include additional questions for a further charge.